


Darkside

by rogueobservation



Series: Darkside [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Asgard (Marvel), F/M, God of Mischief, God of Thunder - Freeform, Loki - Freeform, Marvel Universe, Nick Fury - Freeform, Outer Space, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Post-Thor: The Dark World, Pre-Avengers (2012), Pre-Civil War (Marvel), Thor - Freeform, Thor: The Dark World, maria hill - Freeform, natasha romanov - Freeform, tony stark - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 21:18:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19934653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rogueobservation/pseuds/rogueobservation
Summary: The Most Powerful Being in the Universe, Wielder of the Space Stone, Mother of the stars, the Strongest Avenger, Nick Fury’s one good eye, and the God of Mischief’s lover. Claire Knight is a woman of a thousand different titles, but they all began the same way. With the kidnapping of a cube.





	1. Five Miles

White clouds flowed over the vast blue sky, breaking languidly as the bow of the Helicarrier traveled through them. Nick Fury huffed out a sigh, looking away from the windows across from him, pulling back the sleeve of his leather coat to glance at his watch. Shit. He was thirty minutes late for his lunch meeting. 

“Sir,” Agent Phil Coulson called from behind him. 

Nick glanced over his shoulder, seeing Coulson holding a white SHIELD file, nodding towards the glass conference table. Three black to-go containers sat waiting for him. Natasha Romanoff sat beside them, leaning her elbows on the table, staring pensively at a hologram in front of her detailing the face-trace for Clint Barton, Erik Selvig and their new “leader”, Loki of Asgard. She glanced up from the hologram at Coulson’s voice to containers, then to the director, slightly smirking at him. 

Nick walked up to the table, grabbing the containers. “You think she’s going to be mad, Agent Romanoff?” 

Natasha sat back in her chair and shrugged. “If she is, she forgives easily.”

“Who?” Steve Rogers piped up from his spot on the other side of the table, watching the same face-trace as Natasha. He eyed the containers curiously, wondering who the ‘she’ was they were talking about. Bruce Banner stood beside him, glancing every couple of seconds at the guards nearby.

Nick Fury didn’t answer Steve, instead, sharing a look with Natasha and turned slightly to look at Maria Hill. “You’re in charge of this boat until I get back.” Maria gave a curt nod, turning back around with her hands on her hips, resuming with a protocol issue at the bridge techs below them. 

Nick looked at Coulson. “Keep an eye on that trace, let me know if anything comes up.” 

“Yes, sir.”

“Dr. Banner,” Nick glanced at the man. “Would you mind coming with me? I’ll show you to your lab. Coulson, hand him the file.”

Nick didn’t wait for Bruce’s consent, already taking off in the direction of the nearest hallway off on the right side of the bridge, long black coat billowing behind him. Bruce grabbed the file from Coulson and followed after the director, matching his quick stride as he expertly led them through the hallways of the Helicarrier. 

“I hope it’s not a problem, but we’ve put one of ours in your lab.” Nick glanced over his shoulder at Bruce. “You read Selvig’s reports about the Tesseract on the flight here, right?” 

Bruce nodded.

“You’ll be familiar with her work, then. Open the file.” 

Bruce followed the command, raising an eyebrow skeptically. He eyeballed the monochrome cover, seeing that it was stamped with ‘CLASSIFIED’, ‘RESTRICTED ACCESS’, ‘LEVEL 10’ and ‘CODEWORD CLEARANCE ONLY’ in bold red lettering. Bruce remembered how the Tesseract’s file had only been stamped with a ‘Level 7’ label. Curiosity bloomed in his stomach, dancing with his rising anxiety. He opened it up and read over the first page:

Subject: Claire Knight. 

Last Known Address: REDACTED.

Date of Birth: REDACTED.

Status: REDACTED.

Family: REDACTED.

Education: Studied at REDACTED. Ph.D.s in Astrophysics, Nuclear Astrophysics, Astronomy, Nuclear Physics, Cosmology, and Theoretical Astrophysics. Master’s degree in Mathematics.

Current Employment: Astrophysicist. Consultant for NASA on behalf of SHIELD.

Knight. The last name he definitely remembered. It was peppered all throughout the Tesseract’s extensive year-and-a-half mission of research and study. She was the only consultant within Project Pegasus, requested personally by the chief scientist appointed to the Tesseract project by NASA, Stephen O’Neil. From what he read, everything that was done to and about the Tesseract directly went through her for her approval first. Every report was co-signed by her. After reading all the Tesseract’s file, Bruce was caught feeling that she was the actual boss of the project and not Selvig or O’Neil. 

“NASA says Claire Knight is the greatest astrophysicist they’ve ever worked with,” Nick stated. “She’s the key to this whole operation.” 

Bruce turned another page, seeing a piece of Claire’s doctoral dissertation in Astrophysics titled ‘Zero Point Extraction: The Knight Theory’. 

“Key?”

Nick was quiet for a moment as a pair of women in SHIELD issued gym gear passed them, nodding in respect at the director. They turned another corner, going down another long hallway. “She’ll explain it to you,” He said eventually. 

Bruce was almost too enthralled to hear what he had said, nearly running into a wall when Nick took a sharp turn headed down another hallway. 

Holy Shit, Bruce thought as he continued reading. Goosebumps pickling his skin as more and more of Claire’s theory unraveled on the page for him. He’d heard of other’s zero point extraction theories, but this was different. It cut down several long accepted theories, rewriting the basic laws and history of space — calling out and canceling multiple fields in Science, rewriting their mistakes. Old predictions about the string theory, scalar fields, and cosmological inflation were thrown out of the window. Everything from the most minute detail was backed up by painstakingly detailed evidence, research, and examples. Most of which he had never even heard of — mathematical equations so complex it hurt his head to undo — but that he completely believed. It felt emotional — almost personal.

It was brilliant — beyond it’s time, simply revolutionary.

The rhythmic beat of a dum and taborine suddenly started up, echoing down the hallway, making him glance up from the file. Stevie Wonder’s voice carried down the hallway. Bruce raised an eyebrow, looking at the back of Fury’s head, then peeked around him, seeing a dozen heavily armed guards standing at the end of the hallway they were walking down. His stomach lurched with anxiety. 

Nick stopped suddenly, turning to look Bruce square-in-the-eye. Nick’s face hardened, turning deathly serious. “Dr. Banner, you’re about to become the tenth person to know about a closely guarded secret within SHIELD. Everything that’s about to happen is never to be discussed outside the lab, do you understand?”

Bruce nodded, startled.

Nick eyed him for a long moment, searching Bruce’s wide eyes, before turning back around, continuing down the rest of the hallway. Bruce slowly followed after him, wonder why an astrophysicist needed a heavily armed security detail.

The music came from just beyond a set of white double doors that the guards were standing around. Stevie Wonder’s voice cut off mid-verse as the pair approach, switching to a nineties style beat. It vibrated the air around them. Strangely, Bruce recognized the song this time as TLC’s Creep. 

He eyed the tattooed man standing in front of the double doors with weary eyes, lingering on his menacing machine gun as Nick fished out his SHIELD badge from his coat, handing it over to the guard. “Messier. Simone. Washington. Galileo. 3. 14. 1989,” he recited. “She try to leave yet, Bruno?”

Bruno shook his head, searching the badge for something. “No, sir, but the day’s still young.” Humor laced the words, but not his stoic face when he looked up, handing the badge back to the director. “She’s been antsy since returning from radiology at nine. Stuck her head out thirty minutes ago, asking if we’d heard anything from you. Everything’s been quiet since then.”

“Except for the music.” Nick nodded towards the door, stuffing his badge back into his pocket. Bruno pressed his lips into a thin line, giving a curt nod as he stepped aside, opening the door on Bruce’s left for them.

It was a small lab, exactly like any other with it’s glossy white tiled floor, white walls, and white counters. All the science equipment he could ever want lined the left side of the room. When he turned his head to the right of the room, he stumbled back a step, startled as he met face-to-face with a tall, scary blonde woman standing in front of the closed door beside him.

She wasn’t wearing the heavy kevlar or a machine gun like the guards outside. Instead, she wore a simple navy SHIELD uniform and holstered a glock on her right thigh. Her blue eyes narrowed at him skeptically, glaring so intensely at him that he was certain she could see the secrets etched inside his soul. After a moment, they returned back to normal, concluding that he wasn’t a threat.

Bruce pealed his eyes away from her, looking straight ahead towards the middle of the room, glancing at Nick who stood there, following the director’s steady gaze to the expanse of windows across from them on the right half of the room.

Claire Knight was sitting atop one of the lab’s counters, head cast downward, tendrils of hair slightly obscuring her face as she intently read from a book tucked between her crisscrossed legs. One hand cupped her chin, fingers tapping the melody of the song playing, while the other clutched the knitted collar of the army green NASA bomber jacket draped around her shoulders.

Unlike all the other agents he’d seen aboard the Helicarrier, Claire’s SHIELD uniform was jet black. 

The top half was unzipped, haphazardly pooling around her waist, showing the matching tank top she wore underneath. Bruce’s eyebrows furrowed together when he noticed the small neon red adhesives attached to her chest; a larger green one over her heart. 

“Claire,” Fury called. Either she didn’t hear him over the music or was far too engrossed in her book to care, but she didn’t acknowledge him. Nick pressed his lips into a thin line, putting a hand on his hip and raised his voice. “Claire.”

Slowly, she pulled her eyes away from the page, glancing up for half a second before returning back to her book. But when she registered who it was, she picked her head up fully, perking up in realization. She grabbed a small remote from beside her, cutting off the music. A smile found a place onto her lips. Nick returned it. “Sorry I’m late,” He apologized, holding up the containers he brought as some sort of unspoken peace agreement. 

She didn’t say anything back, doe-eyes darting from Nick to the new man standing in her lab. She took him in curiously, scrutinizing him in a less abrasive way than the blonde woman had. Claire glanced back at Nick, silently asking him something that Bruce wasn’t privy to. Nick shook his head and retreated to the other side of the room behind them, setting up their lunch on another counter. 

Claire shut her book and, for a brief second, Bruce saw the messy scrawl around the margins inside; scribbled blue ink in the form of what looked like series of complex mathematical equations like the ones in her zero point extraction theory and some symbols he didn’t recognize. 

She extended a hand towards him, a radiant smile turned his way. “It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Banner.” Her voice was soft, completely genuine. 

There was a series of blinks as he noticed his staring, brain befuddled with thoughts. She was a lot younger than Bruce had guessed based on her file.

A pink blush flushed his cheek as he took her hand. “Sorry. I’m a bit— well, I read some of your work on the way here. Fury gave me a file and—”

“—you didn’t expect someone so young to have completed it?” She finished for him, laughing a little. “Don’t worry. I get that a lot. What was in the file?”

“Um,” He handed over the file to her. She thumbed through it languidly, smiling a little as she read over some passages of the reports inside. “Basic information — a lot was… redacted. I read most of your with Dr. Selvig on the Tesseract on the flight here, but the piece in here — your doctoral dissertation in Astrophysics — really caught my attention; ‘Zero Point Extraction: The Knight Theory.’” 

Claire hummed wistfully, shutting the file, setting it down beside her next to a white mug with the slogan ‘Pluto is a planet, dipshit’ printed on the front of it. 

He couldn’t miss the way her eyes dimmed a bit as they lingered on the file. “The Knight Theory,” she repeated and sighed. “Not my proudest moment.” 

Bruce’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “It should be. It’s astonishing — a groundbreaking piece of work for the science community.”

A small smile curved her lips at the praise, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “That means the world to me, Dr. Banner,” she said. “I wish the scientists at NASA thought of it the same way. They seemed to believe I’m some sort of charlatan despite having a mountain of evidence to back up the theory and six PhDs. They’re the only ones who’ve seen it so far… and, well, now you.”

“When did you complete it?”

“I’m twenty-two now, so… fourteen, maybe.”

Bruce blinked, mouth parting slightly, stunned. The fact that she had gotten her doctorate that young didn’t shock him really (the youngest person to be awarded a doctorate had been only thirteen), it was the fact that she had completed such an extraordinary, transformative piece of work that had the power to change the direction of several fields of science and easily rewrote everything they thought they knew about Space if it was made public that did.

Claire laughed nervously at his reaction, a red tint dusting her cheeks. “Um, yeah, so, introductions.” She pointed over to the set of double doors, motioning to the woman standing there. “The blonde is Agent Jeanine Hart. She’s the head of my security detail. I know she looks like she could snap you in half with her eyes, but she’s truly a sweetheart, I promise. Just very protective of me. And this—“ Claire waved a finger behind her, gesturing to the dark-haired woman standing at a wireless monitor beside her head that Bruce hadn’t noticed before then, “—is Dr. Eliza Vincent. She’s in charge of the team of scientists who monitor me, also my main physician. Nick might run the rest of this ship, but Eliza’s our head honcho around here. Her word is law.”

Eliza had a youthful glow to her otherwise middle-aged face. Her hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, a pink stethoscope curled around her neck. A warm smile curved the corners of her lips, making the sides of her kind eyes crinkle. A sense of safety washed over Bruce. 

She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, stepping around the counter to extend a hand to Bruce. Her pair of electric blue medical scrub pants briefly caught his attention. “Very nice to meet you, Dr. Banner,” she said before excused herself, joining Nick on the other side of the room, grabbing one of the containers he had brought. 

Bruce’s eyebrows furrowed when he looked back at Claire, absorbing what she had said. She’s in charge of the team of scientists who monitor me. 

Claire could practically see the cogs turning in his head as the usual questions flit through his mind. His face morphed into vague confusion, then a shade of curiosity. She’d be lying if she said a piece of her didn’t love this part. 

“Are you sick?” Bruce asked. 

“Healthy as a horse,” she replied casually, hiding her sly smile behind her mug. 

Why are you being monitored by scientists then? 

Claire glanced behind his shoulder, catching Nick’s attentive gaze. He nodded, silently giving her the go-ahead to continue. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach, anxious and giddy with excitement at the same time. Draining the last bit of her coffee, she reached back behind her, pulling out a tablet from Eliza’s small section, tapping a few times on it before handing it over to Bruce. He took it skeptically and reached into his shirt pocket for his glasses. 

On the screen was a sine waveform, similar to that of an EKG’s, but drastically higher than a normal reading. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Every few seconds there was a great dip in the reading, making the waveform plummet downward, then slowly climb back up to astronomical levels again.

After a moment, he glanced up at Claire, perplexed at what he was watching.

“It’s a live reading for Dark Matter.” 

Bruce’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion, staring at her incredulously. “Dark Matter is hypothetical.”

“At one point or another everything was hypothetical—“ 

“Claire,” Fury warned, glancing at her sideways with his sandwich in his hand. He was giving her that look. Remember when you swore you’d go easy on him?

She pressed her lips together and threw him a look of her own, taking the tablet away from Bruce, repeating the same motions again before handing it back. 

Again, there was a sine waveform. This time it wasn’t live, instead, dated just three days prior. They were completely opposite to the first set; still astronomically high for an EKG reading, but stable, without the erratic fluctuation it showed today.

“These were taken the day before Loki took the Tesseract. As you can see, the dark matter levels have been completely erratic since the attack,” Claire said.

“These are the Tesseract’s?” he guessed. 

Claire shook her head.

“Then where are they coming from?”

She gave him a playful smile. “You’re a smart man, Dr. Banner…”

Bruce narrowed his eyes slightly, glancing from her to the monitor that Eliza had been at, then to the adhesives attached to her chest, playing what she had said to him earlier about being monitored by scientists. “They’re yours…” 

“Bingo.”

“How?” 

Claire opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She glanced down, looking at her astronaut printed socks, body curling in on itself as she tugged her jacket closer. “It’s a complicated story,” she said quietly.

“Claire,” he held up the tablet, motioning to her. “From the looks of these readings, you should’ve been dead a long time ago.”

“I could say the same thing for you, Dr. Banner.” She met his eyes. “They’ve been telling us that for the past nineteen years, yet here I am. Still kicking away.”

She slipped off the counter, brushing past him, holding onto her jacket as she walked over to the other side of the room, plopping down on a seat between Eliza and Nick. The latter handed her the last container as she snatched a fry off his plate, smirking when Nick moved his food further from her. 

Claire looked over her shoulder, seeing Bruce still standing where she had left him, sporting a bewildering expression as he watched the tablet’s screen. She sighed and swiveled around. “Okay, look. I’ll try my best to put it simply for you. I have over 540 micro-fragments of the Tesseract embedded into different sections of my body. A large chunk of it is in my chest cavity, surrounding my heart.” 

Bruce opened his mouth to say something, but Claire cut him off by pointing the end of a french fry at him. Everyone seemed to ask the same follow-up question. “No, we can’t take out the fragments, and no, we haven’t tried. By the time technology that advanced was available, the fragments had already managed to alter my DNA and become a fixed part of my anatomy. It’s in my blood, skin and around my major organs. At this point, it would be akin to taking out my brain.” She tilted her head to look at Nick. “Good? Good.” 

She polished it off with a polite smile towards Bruce and swiveled back around. Fury leaned his elbows against the counter, looking over to Dr. Vincent. “Eliza, would you please show Dr. Banner today’s scans and the Gamma readings?”

Eliza followed the same movements as Claire had before handing the tablet back to him, crossing her arms. He recognized Gamma Ray scans instantly. From the looked of it, they had been taken every four hours on the hour, consistently mirroring the gamma signature of the Tesseract. 

A chest CT and an MRI scan showed what Claire said to be correct; there were numerous clusters of fragments located in different sections of her chest cavity. The fragments that were around her heart looked like they had nearly — if not already — encapsulated it. No wonder her EKG is so high, Bruce thought.

“As far as we know, the fragments were once apart of the Tesseract. They share a connection and want to be near each other at all times, therefore Claire always has to be close to the Cube. The farthest we’ve managed to separate the two before both parties started feeling the effects was five miles,” Eliza said, “Five miles, Dr. Banner. Imagine having a magnetic pull on you at all times. If they’re past that five miles radius, they become erratic. Claire’s in constant pain and can’t sleep, while the Tesseract starts to misbehave.”

Bruce looked at Nick, taking off his glasses. “Why are you telling me this?”

“We’re in unknown territory here, Dr. Banner. We have no idea where the cube is, and without it, Claire’s unstable. Unpredictable. A risk to the national security of this whole planet—“ Fury said.

Claire rolled her eyes dramatically at him, forcing a tight smile in his direction. “—Gee, thanks, Nick, really—“ 

He ignored her and continued. “We’re treading on a thin line here, Dr. Banner. Claire’s exhausted all possible options for tracking down the Tesseract that she can think of. So far, no luck.”

Claire swiveled back around to face Bruce. “My last idea was to search for it’s Gamma signature, but somehow, even with my six Ph.D.s, it’s been a fruitless mission.” 

“You want my help.”

“Yes.” She gave him a meek smile. “We knew if you did, per you agreeing to all of this, and if you found the Tesseract’s Gamma signature, that you’d find an identical one, too. My signature. We wanted to make sure you knew everything about the Tesseract so you wouldn’t be following any dead leads.”

Claire paused, looking away into middle distance, frowning. She picked at the sleeves of her uniform laying limp in her lap absentmindedly, searching for the right words. “Dr. Banner, I need you to understand something if you’re going to help us.” She raised her chin, looking at him square-in-the-eye. A chill went down his spine at the raw emotion that shone from the depths of her brown eyes; such heartache and longing swirling together. “The Tesseract and I are one. You have to think of us as one. We’ve been connected for the past nineteen years. I know it might just be a cube to you — something that threatens you — but it’s more than that to me. It’s my family — a piece of soul. I wasn’t there when it was taken, I couldn’t protect it, so I’m putting all my effort into finding it. If you can’t do that too, then I need you to tell me now so I can find someone who can. We’ll let you leave, no strings attached, and go back to wherever you were hiding before Natasha came and got you. But know that Nick thought to call you in because you’re the best in your field.” She paused, lowering her voice a little. “You’re our best hope at bringing home the Tesseract.”

Bruce looked down at his glasses, thinking. He couldn’t say no to her and he knew it. He had already agreed to help before he knew Claire Knight was ever going to be any part of this. He looked up through his lashes, meeting Claire’s hopeful doe-eyes and nodded slowly. “Would you mind if I worked in here?” 

Claire sighed, closing her eyes. For the first in two days, relief flooded her system. She welcomed it with open arms. He’s on board, she thought. Her heartstrings pulled, and that familiar missing piece inside her didn’t feel so empty all of a sudden. The Tesseract was that much closer to coming home. 

A wide, beaming smile spread across her face, making the dimples in her cheeks stand out and her nose winkle delightfully. She opened her eyes, grabbing Nick by his forearm, shaking him around as her happiness boiled over, a string of giggles tumbling out of her mouth. Nick and Eliza grinned back at her, sharing in her relief. 

Claire glanced back at Bruce, still smiling. “Mi casa es su casa, Dr. Banner.”


	2. Lightning Strikes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark comes to the ship and starts trouble. Loki makes a brief appearance. We get to see a little of Claire's powers. And secrets are being thrown around.

White splatter. A graveyard filled with stars. Millions of burning balls of hydrogen and helium stretching out over a vast field of ebony. There wasn’t anything in this world more beautiful.

The pad of her forefinger traced her favorite constellations against her exposed collarbone. 

The loves of my life, she thought. My passion. 

Claire couldn’t recall a time where she hadn’t felt like there was a thread tied between her, the moon, and the stars; knotted around her heartstrings, making her feel alive. 

They were as much a part of her as the Tesseract was. A constant. A comfort. She chalked up the deep feelings she had for them to the fact that, when she was small (and even sometimes now), she had looked up to the celestial bodies for answers to why; writing to the moon for strength and guidance to carry on. They were the reason she soldiered through each day, waiting for the horizon to swallow the sun and for darkness to reclaim the Earth once again.

From early on in her adolescent years, she would stay up late just to watch it all. Sneaking her way onto the rooftop of the Project Pegasus facility, laying there until well after the rays of the sun appeared, watching the stars writhe and shine before fading back into the grim morning light.

Because of her late-night activities, she had developed a nasty case of insomnia. At first, it wasn’t a problem. She’d try and catch a short nap before it was time for the day’s activities. But soon it wore on her. After numerous instances where she’d fallen asleep in the middle of combat training, Fury had been forced to step in and put an end to the stargazing by enforcing a strict curfew that, even now, at twenty-two, still held like concrete. At least until Loki had come through the Tesseract and broke the world around them. 

In the chaos, the curfew had been momentarily forgotten about. They were too busy running around to think about anything that didn’t concern either locating either the Tesseract or Loki. But that was until Bruce showed up. In the few hours since their introduction, she and Banner had made a well-oiled machine, making more progress together in searching for the Tesseract than she had by herself in the two days since the attack. They had contacted every lab at SHIELD’s disposal, telling them to turn on their spectrometers. They’d roughed out a tracking algorithm that would look for gamma-ray clusters that were similar to Selvig’s reports of the cube and her own gamma-ray readings. 

Since she had him around, she could finally breathe easy knowing that if she stopped, someone else would be searching for the cube. She could close her eyes and rest. So, much to her security teams surprise, she willingly followed them to her cabin without the slightest issue (she was known by her detail to be something of a troublemaker. Always managing to slip away from them mysteriously, trying to talk her way out of things, et cetera). She left Bruce to his devices as he finished writing the algorithm. Agent Hart clocked out for a much-needed break. Eliza followed, quickly administering Claire a mild sedative to ease her into sleep and then retired to her own room for, hopefully, a few hours of rest. For the first time in two days, Claire was left by herself.

Her cabin quarters were modest, holding the few things she had shoved into her duffel bag the night of Loki’s attack. A twin-sized bed pressed tightly up against the right wall of the space, a small table beside that held two of her books: a greek language book and a The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking. The bedding was a dull grey like the rest of the room, but her favorite thing was the large, circular window that took up the majority of the farthest wall, against which the bed stood.

Laying on her back in the bed, she could gaze up at the window and see the moon, floating up over the clouds like a balloon of silver light, serene and cool in all of it’s celestial splendor.

She watched for as long as she could until the sedative made her so tired that it was impossible to keep her eyes open.

***

Darkness surrounded her on every side. Neverending. She twisted around, confused. Then, looking down, she realized where she was. A sharp ball of terror settled in the pit of her stomach. No, she thought. No, not again. Please. 

Ink black water surrounded her bare feet, cold as ice. She could make out the moon’s reflection in the distance, beams smearing the black like white paint. And then she saw him. 

He was off to her right a little, back facing her. He turned slowly, seemingly feeling her stare and in the pale light, she could see his hide-like skin, a dark plum color. His eyes were cold and dispassionate, glowing a vibrant white. Claire’s breath caught in her throat. 

Teeth like a grim, white shadow appeared as his mouth split into a malicious grin. She knew what was coming, but she watched on anyway. He lifted his hand, gloved in gleaming gold. Tightening it into a fist, colors appeared, piercing the darkness around them, nearly blinding her. 

There were six settings, one on each knuckle and a larger blurry one on the back of his hand: violet, scarlet, Tesseract blue, and emerald green. The blur was the color of amber, like fossilized tree sap. The colors got brighter by the second as they pulsed and glowed. 

She raised a hand to shield her eyes. 

“There you are,” the figure said, voice gravely and measured. Goosebumps bloomed across her skin as she peeked through her fingers. He was staring right at her with his glowing white eyes. “The girl I’ve heard so much about.”

But something was different this time around because out of nowhere, a bright slash of lightning came bolting past her, cleaving the darkness around her. It sent her shrieking, ducking down in reflex.

She almost missed the way it struck the figure, causing it to disappear right before her eyes. When she started to straighten up, another lightning bolt came from overhead. And another, until they were happening in quick succession of each other, turning into a storm of thunderbolts that rained down around her. She had never heard anything so loud in her life. 

Holding her ears, she squeezed her eyes shut and prayed for it to end. 

In time with the lightning bolts, images flicked across her eyelids like the shutters of a camera: a man with long blond hair, coming out of nowhere from within the darkness like the lightning. He landed on an aircraft hard – one of SHIELD’s quinjet, she realized and understood immediately. 

And then everything stopped. 

***

She woke with a start, bolting upright as if she had been shocked back to life. Not wasting a minute, she threw back the duvet and tumbled out of the bed onto the floor and began fumbling blindly around the moonlit room for some shoes. Hurry up, she thought. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry the hell up! She pulled on the first ones she found – a pair of silver sequin booties that she had no recollection of buying nor bringing with her – and made a mad dash for the door, yanking it open and meeting face-to-face with a dozen guards. Shit. 

Her mouth parted in surprise, watching blearily as their assigned leader for the night shift, a daunting man named Bruno, walk up. He was a nice guy, she knew. Kind and patient. But he didn’t know anything about her. He wouldn’t believe what was happening even if she explained. 

She glanced around at the other guards who stood austerely against the wall, eyes forward like a soldier’s, and then back to Bruno, catching as his mouth moved quickly, forming silent words. 

She blinked at him, eyes widening with fear. 

In her short life, she had been through exactly four “episodes” like this. So-called premonitions of future events that manifested themselves through her dreams. A side effect of having pieces of the Tesseract inside her body. Each time was like the first; thrust into a blind mission.

And never had she been deaf during one of them. 

Bruno said something again, brows connecting. 

In a moment of madness, Claire turned and started bolting down the right half of the hallway. Immediately, she felt the vibrations beneath her of her guards’ boots pounding against the floor as they chased after her. Glancing behind her shoulder, she saw Bruno holding his earpiece, face already flushed red as he yelled. She didn’t have to hear to know what he was saying: 

Code Yellow. Runaway agent.

God, she thought. Hart’s gonna kill me. 

There were two guards stationed at the end of the hallway. With trained ease, Claire dropped to the ground, sliding on the polished floor right-in-between one of the guard’s legs. 

She made a sharp left, starting down another hallway, pushing agents out of the way as she went. She made another sharp left, running as fast as her legs would take her. On and on. 

Hallway, corner, hallway, corner…

By the time she reached the hallway that led to the bridge, her legs were burning fiercely. She could see the doorway at the end and Nick standing at his usual post, looking down at one of the many monitors off-to-the-side, speaking to Maria Hill who stood behind him.

“Nick!” 

She slid out of the hallway at a blinding speed, just a blur of bright colors and limbs. She dug her heels into the ground at an attempt to stop but went falling forward as if a rug had been pulled from behind her, hitting the floor with a very loud and painful sounding bang. 

She understood what a car crash dummy felt like. 

All the pair of eyes in the room shifted to her. The bridge techs below, at the front of the room, came to a screeching halt; all the rapid clicking, movement and murmurs turning silent. 

Claire swore violently, a colorful string of profanities slipping from her mouth as she clutched her bare knee to her chest, face scrunched up in pain as she laid on her back on the floor. 

Nick blinked, looking a mixture of stunned and confused to see her. It was more of the latter than anything. Before he could do or say anything, a series of rapid footfall followed after her, growing closer until all twelve of her armed guard, holding heavy machine guns and all, were standing before Claire in the doorway, looking down at her in utter mortification. 

Nick shot them an irritated look and walked up, offering her a hand. “What are you doing?” She glanced at him with wide eyes. She heard what he said. Her hearing was back. “You’re supposed to be resting. How did you get past–”

“You’re about to get struck by lightning.”

His brows knitted together, not thinking he had heard her correctly from how fast she had said it. “What?” 

“Thor,” she said breathlessly, giving him an urgent look, clutching at his arm like her life depended on it. “Loki’s brother. He’s–”

A series of alarms around the room interrupted her. Claire reluctantly let go of his arm as he turned around and walked back over to his monitors to see what was happening. Maria held her earpiece for a second, glancing at Nick, then at Claire. They didn’t have to say anything. Instead, she felt it, her answer; a weird burning sensation coursing through her veins, igniting her nerves and setting them aflame as if she had been struck by lightning from somewhere deep in her blood. 

He’s here.

The warmth seeped into her; slow-acting poison, forking off from one nerve to the next until it lit up her whole nervous system like a Christmas tree. It burned terribly. Akin to frostbite, but ten thousand times worse. She doubled over in pain as if she had been punched in the gut, inwardly gasping and bracing her hands against her knees in agony, nails digging into flesh. 

She started screaming.

The floor swayed her feet and bright blue clouds swam in the front of her vision, fading in and out softly. Somewhere, off in the distance of her mind, she thought she heard Nick’s voice.

White noise filled her ears loudly. And someone’s hand failed to grab her as she dropped to the floor, knocking her head hard on the ground for the second time in five minutes. Fury’s face appeared above her, eyes wide with horror and concern. The last thing she saw before being swallowed by the vast abyss of unconsciousness was the outline of her name on his lips. 

***

She woke up fifty-five minutes later on a counter in the lab, lightheaded and stiff with aching bones as if she hadn’t moved in days. Her eyes fluttered open slowly, but she immediately shut them as they were assaulted by the bright overhead lights blaring down at her. She groaned, alerting everyone in the room that she was awake. Eliza was on her in a matter of seconds, grabbing her arm with a gentle touch and leaning over her to check her with her stethoscope. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living.” Unlike her normally sunny disposition, Eliza’s face was stoic and her voice was tired, but her eyes were filled with concern. “How do you feel?”

“Just peachy.” Claire rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hand and tried opening her eyes again, blinking rapidly until they adjusted to the light. She sat up and the world spun on its axis a bit too fast for her, a dull pain spread across the front of her skull. Her stomach churned.

On cue, Eliza handed her a tiny white pill and a coffee mug filled with water. 

“From one to ten,” Eliza said, “how bad was this one?”

Claire popped the pill into her mouth and downed it with the water in quick succession. “Eight.” 

“And the pain during?” 

“Ten.” She gave her a deadpan expression, handing back the empty mug. “It’s always a ten.”

Eliza nodded grimly and sighed. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t have a concussion.”

“I’ve had worse,” Claire muttered and glanced down at herself. She was still dressed in her pajamas (a pair of pink sleep shorts and a t-shirt with a colorful, pop-art portrait of Nina Simone on it) and her feet were now bare. She curled her toes in thought. I hope they burned those boots. A dark bruise had started to slowly appear on her right knee while she was unconscious. 

“Look.”

Eliza gently took the edge of the right half of her shirt and pulled it up some. A dark bruise had started to appear on her side as a result from the first time she had fallen. Lightly, Claire touched it and sighed. Fuck. She let her shirt fall back into place. Her eyes drifted upward and something startled her. Standing beside Agent Hart (who, to Claire’s surprise, didn’t look the least bit angry) by the main entrance on the left side of the room were three heavily armed guards like the ones usually stationed outside whichever room she was in. Another two stood beside the second entrance on the opposite side of the room. She also noticed that Bruce Banner was nowhere in sight.

Claire met Hart’s eyes, brows connecting. “What’s with the extra firepower?”

“It’s for in case something goes awry,” she said. “Captain Rogers and Agent Romanoff successfully caught Loki in Germany. They got his scepter from the other night, too. They’re bringing him to his cell now. So, until he’s secured, Fury’s placed you under lockdown.”

“Of course he has.” Claire frowned. “Where’s Bruce? What happened with Thor?”

“Dr. Banner,” Hart said, “is in the bridge right now with Romanoff and Captain Rogers. Fury wanted to give you a breather when you came to. And Thor, after you had blacked out from your episode, came to Earth and got hold of Loki for a bit. A scuffle ensued between Rogers and him, nearly destroying a whole forest, but luckily, they worked out their disagreement before they did. Coulson’s catching him up with everything as we speak before they bring him to the bridge.”

In fifty-five minutes, everything had changed once again. New players had been added and the antagonist was caught, but the Tesseract was still far, far away. She would have felt it as soon as she came too if they had caught it, but there was nothing. Only vast emptiness. 

Silence settled on the lab as the normal protocol fell into place. Eliza pricked Claire’s arm with a needle, drawing some blood to test, but Claire didn’t feel it. She’d been so poked and prodded in her short life to the point where she hardly noticed it anymore. Tucking a curved hand under her chin, she sighed heavily and tilted her head towards the fluorescents above. 

Boom, Boom, Boom. 

Claire looked across the room at the window that faced out into the hallway just outside the lab. They all heard it; the loud, synchronized boot steps of guards. At least a dozen, she thought. The same amount she had with her at all times. A moment passed and the steady noise grew closer until two guards appeared followed by a raven head of hair. The trickster god himself. 

She couldn’t remember how many moments passed, only that time seemed the stretch into an eternity as he went by. And how all other sounds drifted away except for the violent pounding of her heartbeat, a raging war drum against her ribs, a deafening sound in her ears. 

She watched as his gaze drifted to the right, catching against hers. Loki. 

He resembled a corrupt angel – the devil after his fall – with an almost preternaturally handsome face and a louche quality that seemed to shroud him as a result, she guessed, from a couple of thousand years of depravity and mischief. He was pale with angular features and eyes that glimmered with roguery as a wicked smirk curved the corners of his mouth. His slender wrists were bound behind his back by cuffs and his black hair flared out at the bottom of his neck. 

He was simply unforgettable. 

And as quickly as he came, he went. The bubble was popped and reality spilled into her space. Claire blinked and the trickster god was gone. She would have thought she’d dreamt it all up – a result of her hitting her head so badly twice in a day – if it hadn’t been for the guards trailing down the hallway after him. Eliza’s voice reached her ears after a moment, calling her name, asking if she was alright as she placed a bandaid where she’d inserted the needle for blood. 

“Yes,” Claire said, in a monotone. “More than.”

***

After Eliza finished the tests she wanted to run on her and Loki was secured in his cell, Claire was escorted to the bridge per Fury’s order. She was led by Agent Hart, instead of her usual flank of guards (Fury didn’t want Steve Rogers nor Thor to question why an astrophysicist needed such heavy protection.) 

Despite her insistent requests, she wasn’t allowed to go back to her room to change back into her SHIELD uniform, so, still barefoot and dressed in her pajamas with her NASA bomber jacket wrapped around her shoulders, Claire met the living legend, Steve Rogers, and the Norse god, Thor.

They had exchanged simple greetings, a shake of hands and Claire took a seat – Nick’s seat – at the head of the conference table they were sitting around (minus Thor who had opted to stand and brood). Natasha sat to her left, while Bruce was on her right. She pulled her badly bruised knee to her chest, arms wrapped around it, as her other leg dangled to the ground, bare toes automatically curled against the cool floor. I probably look insane, she thought. 

Steve was the one who spoke up first. “Do you work for SHIELD?” 

“I’m an Astrophysicist.” She nodded, giving a polite smile. The silence that lingered was thick and awkward. Uncomfortably, she drummed Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams against her leg. “I consult for NASA on behalf of SHIELD regarding the Tesseract,” she continued, gaze drifting over to the God. “Selvig speaks of you in high regards.”

His brows connected. “Erik?”

“He’s a colleague of mine. I assume they told you that your brother has him under some sort of spell.” Claire narrowed her eyes, tilting her head. Thor went silent, exchanging a glance around the table. She took it as a no. “It was caused by that scepter of destiny he’s got,” she said. “He’s building another portal like the one from Project Pegasus. It’s why he needs Selvig.”

“I want to know why Loki let us take him. He’s not leading his Chitauri from here,” Steve said. 

The Chitauri. Loki’s space army, which, according to Thor, weren’t any world known. 

“I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki,” Bruce said from beside her. “That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him.”

“Have care how you speak,” Thor warned, crossing his arms as he stared at Bruce. “Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother.”

Natasha glanced at Thor. “He killed 80 people in two days.”

There was silence. Thor shifted on his feet. “He’s adopted.”

“Look.” Claire leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “They have the stabilizing agent now that they need to build the new portal, the Iridium that they stole from Germany. It’ll make sure that the portal won’t collapse in on itself like it did at SHIELD while also keeping it open for as long and—”

“—as wide as Loki wants it to be.” 

Claire turned around in her chair, and to her utmost surprise, saw Tony Stark standing in the doorway beside a rather uncomfortable looking Phil Coulson. The sound she made was a mix between a scoff and a laugh. She hadn’t seen him in months. A grin spread across her face. 

“Oh, right, surprise!” Tony looked between Coulson and her. He glanced briefly at her pajamas. “Coulson didn’t say we were having a slumber party, hotshot. I feel overdressed.” 

He fiddled with his tie. She rolled her eyes and stood up from her seat, quickly making her way to him, throwing her arms around his neck, pulling him into a tight hug which Tony returned gladly, his own grin plastered across his face, looking more like a rubber-faced clown than himself. 

She and Tony went back, all the way to two years prior. 2010. A warehouse in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Nick Fury had just finished informing him that he wasn’t recommended for the Avengers Initiative, but rather his suit was and that SHIELD only wanted him as a consultant. 

Tony had blinked and then stood without a moment’s hesitation, shaking the director’s hand and telling him not so kindly that SHIELD couldn’t afford him. When he turned on his heel to leave, he found Claire standing at the top of the stairs that led out of the room. She was a stark contrast against the dim and dusty warehouse; a boxy mandarin orange shirt tucked into a light pair of jeans. Her white converse were dirty and her youthful face was speckled with freckles. 

It was on that day that he not only became a consultant of SHIELD but the eighth person in the entire world to know about her existence and her relationship with the Tesseract. Not long after that, he began to formulate an impression of her; intelligent beyond anything he’d ever seen despite barely scraping the tender age of twenty then. The passion for astronomy ran through her like blood. And she was seemingly the one person in the world Nick Fury was amiable too. 

Claire pulled away from him. “They didn’t tell me you were coming in.”

“Well, that’s the point of the whole surprise thing.” 

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes again and instead smiled softly, watching as Tony quickly greeted everyone at the table, noticing how he lingered on Natasha. There was something akin to a sibling rivalry with them. The billionaire teasingly winked at her and drifted away from them towards Nick’s monitors, looking out over the bridge techs below. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder to Claire, barely glancing in her direction as he waved a hand. “As you were.”

“Um, right, so the rest of the raw materials are pretty easy to obtain. Really the only major thing they’ll need now would be a high-energy density power source. Something to kick-start it.”

“Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?” Steve asked.

“Well,” she replied, “The Tesseract has a coulomb barrier. Just to break through it, you’d have to heat the cube to… around 120-million Kelvin.”

“Unless,” Tony added, spinning around. “Selvig’s figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.”

Bruce fiddled with his glasses, looking over at Tony. “If he can do that, then he would be able to achieve heavy-ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.”

“Someone who can speak English around here.” The billionaire smiled and glanced at Claire. “Looks like we have a new recruit to our super secret club, hotshot.” 

Claire watched, barely holding in her laughter, as Tony extended a hand to Bruce and introduced himself. Tony looked like he was on the verge of a fanboy episode, excitement shining through his eyes as he complimented Bruce’s work on antielectron collision and the way he lost control and turned into a big, green rage monster. Bruce smiled shyly.

“Dr. Banner is only here to aid Claire in tracking the cube.” Nick’s voice boomed in the room as he waltzed in. Claire craned her head around, meet his eyes briefly as relief flash quickly in them before disappearing. He took a stand beside her and crossed his arms, looking over at Tony. “I was hoping you’d join them.”

“I’d start with that stick of his,” said Steve. “It may be magical, but it works an awful lot like a Hydra weapon.” 

“I don’t know about that,” Nick said, “but it is powered by the cube.”

“It’s not.”

Everyone’s attention turned to Claire. Her face flushed awkwardly. “It’s not magical, rather just made of otherworldly science,” she corrected, briskly. “And the scepter isn’t powered by the cube. The two vessels just behave in a similar fashion. They’re connected in some way.”

Thor looked at her quizzically. “And how do you know that?”

She opened her mouth, but quickly shut it, glancing briefly up at Nick and then back to the table of mismatched heroes. “I’m probably the world’s leading expert on the Tesseract. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.” 

There was a tense silence. Claire balanced on the sides of her feet, looking around at everyone until Tony clapped his hands together and glanced between Bruce and her. “Shall we play?”

***

Before she left, Nick managed to catch her by the elbow. He pulled her out of earshot of the others. She glanced up and met his eyes, giving him a questioning look. He looked more tired than he had in a long time; a deep shadow under his one good eye. 

“How bad?” 

She knew what he was talking about. The episode. 

“Eight, but the pain was a ten,” she said. Claire noticed his face darken. A soft smile of reassurance appeared on her lips. “I’m fine. Really. Don’t worry. Eliza gave me the all-clear.”

“You didn’t look fine when you were screaming.” 

“Funny,” she said dryly. “You should be a comedian. Now, if you can excuse me–”

Quickly, she tried to walk away, but Nick caught her by the elbow and brought her back to her original spot, giving her his signature irritated look. She glanced away to the wall. 

“You’re overexerting yourself,” he said sternly. 

“I’m not,” she replied. “I know my limits.”

“This is different.”

She looked back up at him. “Nick, I understand you’re worried, but I got this. Really. If something was wrong, I’d tell you. You know that.”

He stared at her for a long time until finally, he exhaled deeply. “You’d tell me if something’s wrong,” he echoed.

Though he sounded like he was speaking more to himself, she answered. A smile appeared back on her face. “In a heartbeat.” She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Vice versa, right?”

Nick nodded and put his hands on his hips. “Go.”

***

She was sitting crisscrossed in front of Loki’s scepter when Tony handed her something. The lab windows that overlooked the dark shadows of the moonlit clouds outside was to her right. Tony’s front brushed up against her right knee. His voice was excited but soft and low. 

“Brought you a little something. Consider it an early birthday gift from Pep and me.”

She raised an eyebrow in question when he handed her a metal bracelet from the trunk of belongings he’d brought with him. It was simple. Metallic. “My birthday isn’t for another two months.” She glanced at him with the vaguest hint of curiosity. “What does it do?”

“It’s an updated version of the StarkTech adhesives,” he said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “With this, you won’t have to wear them anymore. Eliza can track you from anywhere.”

“Of course.” She gave him a small smile and put it on her wrist, holding it out in front of her as if to see how it looked. It looked like a plain bracelet. She looked back up at him. “Thank you.”

Tony pulled out a tablet and pulled up the readings that were now being charted off her bracelet. Coulson had told him how bad they were. Dangerous and unpredictable had been the words he used at the time. They were higher than normal, flying into astronomical levels like he’d never seen before and taking drastic plummets downward. He looked up at her, eyes concerned. She didn’t seem to feel what was happening inside her. If she did, she made no notice of it on her face.

Balancing the tablet in one hand, Tony reached over and used the other to squeeze her arm gently, getting her attention. Big, doe eyes met his. A melancholic look in them simmering just above the surface. “I heard about your earlier episode,” he said. “How are you holding up, kid?”

She shrugged with another small smile. He could tell it was forced. “Fine, really, despite everything.” It wasn’t necessarily a lie. She was fine, technically. It’s just there was something missing. An unease right beneath the surface. An empty feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t shake, digging harder and harder into her ribs as the hours ticked by without a sign of the Tesseract. 

She blinked her gaze away and didn’t speak for a long moment. “It’s strange,” she said quietly, voice distant, “being away from it. It’s been years since we’ve been separated, at least not since they found out that there was a connection. It’s like…”

Her sentence hung in the air as her eyes danced around the room as if searching for the right words. Nothing apparently seemed to suffice though because she didn’t say anything else. 

He squeezed her arm again. “We’re doing everything we can to get the cube back.”

“I know.”

Tony peaked over his shoulder at Bruce who was working on a tablet quietly on the opposite side of the room. He leaned closer towards Claire and lowered his voice. “Coulson told me that you let the cat out of the bag earlier,” he said. “Just how much does he know?”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached out in front of her and just barely, with a feather-light touch, grazed her middle finger on the sharp end of the scepter. Her mouth parted in awe, fingers running downward until they were a hairsbreadth away from the stone. But she didn’t touch it. Her fingers stopped short, vibrant energy illuminating her slender fingers.

Her voice was scarcely a whisper. “About the shared connection and the fragments.” She ran her fingers back up and over the curve of the scepter. “Despite being in chaos, we still have to follow Nick’s protocol.”

Tony watched her and frowned. “Yeah.”

***

Claire had moved to the center of the room after Bruce had needed the space to scan the scepter. Chin cupped in her palm, she leaned over the counter in the middle of the room, double-checking some calculus work Tony had handed to her a minute before on a tablet. 

For the thousandth time in the past hour, she felt drawn to glanced up, directly looking at Loki’s scepter, glaring at the stone at the top. It was blue, but not the purest she’d seen. It wasn’t Tesseract blue, rather the tiniest bit darker. To the normal eye, they would have looked identical, but it wasn’t. And she didn’t have a normal eye. She had been looking at the Tesseract day after day for nearly her whole life. 

Tesseract blue was ingrained in her DNA, literally. She would know it in a heartbeat. 

She could see the similarities between them, too. The scepter shone as brilliantly as the cube did, pulsing with radiant energy. Bruce hadn’t even finished scanning the stick and she knew, without a doubt, that they had similar gamma-ray signatures. A similar signature to her. 

You’re related somehow, she thought, narrowing her eyes. I know it.

“Top ten floors, all R&D. You’d love it. Ask Claire, it’s like Candy Land to science junkies.” Tony glanced up, seeing Claire looking at the scepter intensively with a dreamy expression on her face. His brows furrowed slightly. “Right, Claire?”

She hadn’t heard what he said. “Right,” she murmured back mechanically. 

She blinked hypnotically, mouth gaped open slightly as she ran the pad of her thumb over the bottom row of her teeth. How do you know my cube, stranger? 

Time slipped away from her and the calculus equations went forgotten. After a moment, her eyes were bone dry and she had to blink out of her moment to get them to stop stinging. 

Suddenly, she blearily found herself looking at the back of Steve Rogers’ star-spangled costume. Where did he come from? She slid her gaze upward from the scepter to Tony and Bruce who were standing behind it staring at the Captain. Whatever had happened while she zoned out, Steve didn’t look happy about it. His hands were clenched into tight fists and the back of his neck was flushed with anger.

“You need to focus on the problem, Mr. Stark.” 

“Do you think I’m not?” Tony asked, grabbing a bag of sealed blueberries from his toybox of gadgets, opening it. He popped a couple in his mouth. “Why did Fury call us in? Why now? What isn’t he telling us? I can’t do the equation unless I have all the variables.”

Claire’s eyes widened in surprise. She stared at Tony as if he were from another planet. “Have you lost your mind?” Everyone looked at her. Her brows creased, upset. “We called Bruce in once all my options for locating the Tesseract had run dry. Nick went to recruit Steve because of his history with the cube, and plus, we could use a soldier to go up against Loki if it ever came to it.” She pointed a finger at the billionaire. “And he called you in without my knowledge, but I think it’s pretty obvious to why. Your brain, your skill, your suit.”

Tony waved a hand. “Why couldn’t he do it before, then, Claire?”

“Because everything was perfectly fine up until the point where the God of Lies decided to show up in the middle of the night, obliterate Pegasus, and steal the Tesseract!”

Steve sighed and glanced back over at Tony. “You think he’s hiding something?” 

“He’s a spy. He’s the spy,” Tony said. “His secrets have secrets.”

The statement struck her like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. Especially in the company of literal strangers. He is out of his mind. Her eyes widened in disbelief. He looked over at her. Bruce and Steve watched their wordless dialogue. 

After a moment, Steve looked at Bruce. “Doc?”

Bruce’s gaze flickered from the ground over to Tony. “Stark Tower. It’s powered by an arc reactor, a self-sustaining energy source.” He took off his glasses. “That building will run itself for, what, a year?”

“It’s just the prototype.” Tony shrugged. He looked over at Steve. “I’m kind of the only name in clean energy right now,” he said in explanation. “That’s what he’s getting at.”

“So,” Bruce continued, “why didn’t SHIELD bring him in on the Tesseract project?”

Claire crossed her arms. “Oh, you can’t be serious, right now.” 

“Claire, you of all people have to agree this is a little suspect.” Tony glared at her. She frowned. “I’m already a consultant for SHIELD. Why wouldn’t they just bring me on to help?”

“Maybe because they didn’t want to?” she offered. Tony gave her a deadpan look. “Project Pegasus was an extremely sensitive and classified matter. Your clearance alone wouldn’t have gotten you anywhere near the facility.” 

“Okay,” said Bruce, “but what are they doing in the energy business in the first place?” 

“You know why, Doctor Banner.”

“I’m sorry.” Steve looked between the two of them. “Am I missing something here?”

"It’s classified information,” murmured Claire. It was an automatic response.

“Well, I guess we’ll know why once my decryption program finishes breaking into all of SHIELD’s secure files. In a few hours, I’ll know every dirty secret SHIELD has ever tried to hide.”

Claire’s face fell. "Tony, you didn’t…”

“JARVIS has been running it since I hit the bridge.” He glanced up at her. “Sorry, Claire.”

She couldn’t even think of a word to describe what she was feeling. It swelled in her stomach, making her jaw tightened. A dark, serious look overtook her sweet brown eyes. She spoke through her teeth, glaring daggers at Tony. “I need to speak to you. Now. In private.”

Tony sighed and trailed behind her as she walked to the opposite side of the room out of earshot of the others. Claire leaned against the counter in the back, facing away from Bruce’s wondering eyes. She did glance behind her shoulder though when she heard the main entrance door automatically open and shut, watching Steve Rogers leave without another word. 

When she turned back around, Tony was leaning against the counter across from her, waiting. 

She met his eyes.

“You’re on thin ice.”

“You can’t honestly believe something about this isn’t weird.” 

“No, Tony, I don’t,” she snapped without hesitation, voice hushed. “And you want to know why? Because I am the leading expert on Nicholas Joseph Fury. And he made a promise to me a long time ago to be honest with me. Especially in matters concerning the Tesseract. We do not lie to one another. Ever. If there was something going on with it or Nick, I’d be the first to know.”

Tony popped another blueberry in his mouth.

She snatched the packet from his hand. He made a face and pouted like a child. 

“Tony, I consider you a part of my family,” she whispered. “You know things about me that only six other people in the world know.” His eyes softened. “I’m all here for breaking the rules around here, you know that, but in doing this little stunt, you’re risking the outing of serious world security information. I need you to promise me that it won’t come out.”

Tony exhaled deeply. “I promise.”

“No.” She shook her head. “On your life, promise me.”

He straightened up and made the mark of an X over the middle of his chest. “Cross my arc reactor and hope to die. I swear it won’t even come close to it.” 

They stared at each other for a long time until he broke it, glancing down at his packet of blueberries in her hand. “Can I have those back now?”

Claire rolled her eyes and shoved them into his chest. He grinned happily and moved over to her counter, leaning against it beside her. She leaned her head on his shoulder with a tired sigh. 

“I consider you a part of my family, too.” 

She looked up at him through her lashes. “I know,” she said. He leaned his head on hers. “I love you like a brother, Tony, but you’re a complete pain in my ass sometimes.”

He laughed. “Is there any way I can make it up to you?”

Claire was silent for a minute, thinking. “Yes, actually.” 

She looked up at him, reaching over and taking a blueberry out from his little packet and popping it into her mouth. There was a strange glitter to her eyes suddenly. A small smirk curved one side of her lips. “You can make it up to me by helping me get in to see Loki undetected.”


End file.
